The Central government has made an audacious move by announcing the demonetization of the Indian currency. The highest currency notes of 500 and 1000 have been demonetized from November 9th. India is not unfamiliar with currency demonetization situation. It has been done twice before, in 1946 and then again in 1978. However, it failed miserably both the times. Call it the unsullied influence of one of the most appreciated prime ministers of India, this time demonetization is implemented with colossal sincerity. This decision tops the list of all the happenings in the country at the moment. RBI has already issued 2000 rupees banknotes. This step has certainly marked the declaration of war against corruption and black money marketing in India. Initially, there is a lot of hassle in the currency depositing and withdrawal process. People in long queues can be seen outside the banks to deposit their money. But this can prove to be an effective strategy in the long run.

We tracked all the tweets from November 11th to November 12th, 2016, concerning the termination of 500 and 1000 rupees notes and analyzed a total of 6268 tweets. The results of the analysis reveal how well people have taken this.

Overall sentiment analysis for currency demonetization

The overall sentiment analysis proves that this decision is acceptable to the people on a much greater scale. The following pie chart holds the exact statistics on the topic.

65% of the total population has welcomed the decision with an open heart. 20% people don’t seem so keyed up about it. And as usual, there are some people who don’t find it obligatory to react in a situation. Hence, 15% of people stay neutral.

Age Segmentation

We analyzed the opinion data for the people of all the ages and categorized them into three age groups. It seems that the people of all age groups are dynamically involved in the debate. However, according to the conclusions, the youth of the nation (25 to 34) has the maximum vocal share on the highest denominations ban. The following pie chart represents the age wise involvement of the people in the discussion.

Popular hashtags and keywords

The currency demonetization has got people talking on the social media platforms and has generated several topics of discussion linked with it. We tracked the conversations and with the help of our deep learning based classifiers, we have generated a word cloud of the most talked about topics induced as a result of currency ban.

The texts in green represent the topics discussed with positive sentiments regarding them. The texts in red are negatively spoken for.

Region-based participation on the subject

Currency demonetization has spawned reactions and reviews all across the country. We have collected the data that depicts the regions that have most actively participated in the debate. The following map illustrates the top 5 regions that have a remarkable share of voice for note banning.

As seen in the image, Maharashtra has the highest opinion holders followed by Karnataka, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat.

Currency demonetization has created a lot of chaos around. However, the people are taking it very well and looking it as a big step in the direction of battling against corruption.

At Karna-AI, a ParallelDots product, we deploy a range of cutting-edge AI techniques to derive meaningful insights from large chunks of unstructured text. This can be of great use to brands, market research companies and consulting agencies of all kinds. If you have any questions or suggestions, we would love to hear from you. our social media handles Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Medium.